Inside Out - From General Counsel to Fulbright Partner
Some people call it serendipity, those moments when everything in life lines up at just the right time. For Peggy Heeg, her unmapped journey as a lawyer began in college. “As far as my future, I didn’t know what I wanted to do. Since I was the first in my family to graduate from college, I had no role models to guide me through career decisions. So after talking to a career counselor, I decided to take several self-evaluative tests that measure your personality against careers to determine what careers would be of interest to you. Lawyer came up really high. Forest ranger came up really high too, but I decided to choose lawyer. I didn’t even know what a lawyer did other than Perry Mason,” laughs Peggy.
With no sure-fire plan in place, Peggy went straight from law school into a position at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). After two-and-a-half years at the FERC and a year at Akin Gump, Peggy joined Tenneco Energy in 1989 (which was acquired by El Paso Corporation in 1995). Peggy worked her way up the corporate ladder and became General Counsel of El Paso in 2000. “As General Counsel of a large company with a large legal staff and complex legal issues, you are constantly putting out fires. My job at El Paso was 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and I got calls all the time. You don’t have the luxury of sitting down, researching and really contemplating issues. Decisions have to be made immediately, and often, you have to rely on your instincts.”
“During my last two years at El Paso, I guided the Board through a nasty proxy fight, government investigations, complex antitrust litigation, shareholder litigation, Sarbanes-Oxley and three CEOs. The experiences I gained are valuable to clients at Fulbright. I enjoy helping clients deal with the complex issues that corporations face today and I often consult directly with the General Counsel of corporations.”
Peggy joined Fulbright in March 2004 as a partner in the Houston office’s Corporate and Energy Practice Groups and currently serves on the firm’s Executive Committee. “When I decided to leave El Paso, I had many choices. I had great familiarity with most of the major law firms in the United States. I chose Fulbright because of its strong international reputation, the quality of its attorneys, its welcoming culture and the strategic insight of Fulbright’s management. The pace at Fulbright is completely different. It’s much quieter here. The pressures are there, but it’s a very different kind of pressure.”